Graduate Speaker Series 2012: Tanya Agathocleous (Updated 11/9/12)

Tanya Agathocleous, CUNY:Choosing between Country and Friend: Modernism, Syncretism and Disaffection in the Imperial Encounter

Ideals of East-West syncretism abound in a range of early twentieth-century works, from the theosophical lectures of Annie Besant to the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. The cultural union of East and West was imagined as a solution to global political conflict and often allegorized as an affective relationship, such as a romance or friendship. Yet it was also represented as a relationship destined to fail; this lecture explores the formal and political significance of disaffection in works such as Forster's Passage to India and the modernist magazine East and West.